Tag Archives: health

So, you’ve fallen off the wagon? Or perhaps the holidays were a little more indulgent than you planned? And now you’re paying for it. You’re paying for it with joint pain and stiff joints when you wake up in the morning. Maybe you’re also paying for it with not-so-nice tummy feelings as well. You know that getting back on the anti-inflammation wagon will fix things up again…but is there anything else you can do to speed the process?

Yes! There is!

This is something that I’ve been doing for about a year on a regular basis, but especially during flare-ups of joint or digestive discomfort. It’s a drink made with two joint-support powerhouses: raw apple cider vinegar, and gelatin/collagen!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “What kind of maniac DRINKS vinegar!?” Well, I’m not suggesting you just down the stuff straight, of course. When you combine a tablespoon or two in a glass of apple cider, it just tastes like apple cider that has started to ferment. Just a little tangy. It’s perfectly palatable that way. I’ve even started to crave it at times.

Take this twice a day, morning and night – or more, if you feel like it. If you want this to help specifically with digestive problems as well as joint pain, take this before meals, but otherwise it doesn’t matter if you take it with food or without. Now, if you’ve accumulated a ton of inflammation and have been eating a lot of bad-for-you foods for a long time – then it will take a little while for you to feel that this is helping. It will be helping, but you might not feel it at first; you’ll have to take it regularly for several weeks, combined with a clean diet, to start feeling relief. However, it will speed it up faster than just clean eating alone. If you’ve just had a little blip of bad food choices, though, and are feeling the results in your body, this should start to help you right away as you return to your standard good food choices!

Assembling your drink. (It’s not rocket science folks.)

Since you have to be careful how much fruit juice you drink when you’re managing inflammation, I always start out with the glass half or 3/4 full of water first.

Then fill it the rest of the way with apple cider or unfiltered apple juice…

and pour in a tablespoon or so of apple cider vinegar. This has to be the good raw kind – like Braggs – not the pasteurized stuff.

Then I stir in a tablespoon or so of gelatin. It has to be a special kind of gelatin, though, called collagen hydrosylate. It dissolves completely in both hot and cold liquid, so you can add it to anything you want. I suggest Great Lakes brand – the kind that comes in the green can. (You can order it here in bulk, or in individual quantities from Amazon.) Stir it in right away until dissolved.

That’s it. Since I get a little paranoid about if the vinegar might be eating away at my teeth, for good measure I also rinse out with water after I finish drinking it.

There are other benefits to this drink beyond just joint support, of course. The gelatin is good for joints, skin, hair, and soothing the intestine. Apple cider vinegar is known to be good for a wide variety of things. I personally have found it to help with digestive discomfort, heartburn, and healing faster from a sore throat. So, this can help you in many ways – not only in soothing achy fingers!

For more than a year, I’ve had a liver sitting in my freezer. I got it as part of my meat share, from a grass-fed cow raised on a local farm. It’s just been sitting there, a big lump wrapped in butcher paper, getting in the way of the food I actually want to eat. I finally shoved it down into the darkest, deepest corner of the freezer to get it out of the way, and tried to forget about it.

But, I never really did forget about it, because I knew that it was good for me. Like..super, duper, one-of-the-best-foods-a-person-could-eat good for me. Liver is one of the best sources of iron, as well as Vitamin A and all the B vitamins (B-12 in particular), and a mysterious “anti-fatigue” element that dramatically increases energy and stamina. Surely, I had to find a way to get this stuff into my body.

But every time I thought about it, I just shuddered and then quickly shoved the thought into the same deep, dark corner in which the liver was languishing in my freezer. I just couldn’t face it.

Well, folks, I finally faced it. Two weeks ago, knowing that my health is still on the mend from adrenal fatigue and that I needed extra support with winter coming on, I decided I should take advantage of the wonder-food I had hidden in my freezer. I recalled an article I read once about someone turning their liver into easy-to-palate frozen liver pills – things you could just pop in your mouth and swallow down with juice. So I thought, “I can do that,” and set out to transform my lump of scary organ into something I could imagine putting in my body.

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I’ve been gone a long time. I know! My last post was waaaay back on June 28, which is an eternity ago in blogging years!

So here’s what happened: My family and I went to China in August. And the preparation for that took over every millimeter of brain space for the entire month of July so blogging completely went out the window. And then I got back and kind of became a raving lunatic in the grips of adrenal fatigue. (That picture up there really just sums up how I felt for about 2 months). But more about that later.

First, it was an amazing trip! We went to volunteer with an organization called Evergreen. Evergreen runs a camp for children and youth in the summer called Joy in the Journey, a place where they can practice English and also just have a break from the intense academic pressure that’s put on Chinese kids. My husband is friends with the man who is in charge of that camp, and so we were excited to go help! We taught English, helped cook, led activities, learned some Mandarin, and forged relationships. And we got to see the Great Wall! As a mother, it was completely satisfying to see the impact the trip had on my children, and how much of a life-changing experience it was for them! Here, briefly, are a few pictures for the curious among you, before we go on with the point of this post.

As amazing as the trip was, though, it took a HUGE toll on me physically. I knew I wasn’t doing well while we were there, but I thought I’d just push through it and come home and be all better again.

Well, I was wrong.

After a few weeks back home I was doing worse than ever. I was tired all the time but I couldn’t sleep. I was extremely, irrationally emotional. Tiny little life stressors became huge deals that sent me spiraling. I cried all the time. I was, in short, a complete mess. And the very last thing on my mind was keeping up with the blog!